As described in the post Creating Audiobooks, I’ve recorded the five titles in my Cornish Detective series and they are available on Audible: https://www.audible.co.uk/
To help readers (listeners?) choose an audiobook a retail audio sample is included.
Find attached the sample for Who Kills A Nudist?
As described in the post Creating Audiobooks, I’ve recorded the five titles in my Cornish Detective series and they are available on Audible: https://www.audible.co.uk/
To help readers (listeners?) choose an audiobook a retail audio sample is included.
Find attached the sample for The Perfect Murderer.
I apologise for a dearth of posts in the last few months, but since late April last year, I’ve devoted myself to turning my five Cornish Detective novels into audiobooks.
Sales of talking books rose by 31%-34% in lockdown, so it made sense to jump on the bandwagon. Little did I know, when I began the process, who long it would take. I’ve worked a minimum of 10 hours daily, usually 12 and, one time, 16 hours—which left my brain the size of a peanut!
Each of the novels devoured at least 1,000 hours of my time. I’m not kidding, for though the narration and recording ofhttps://colony.litopia.com/threads/narrating-blues.7939/ a story can be pleasurable, it’s the editing and mastering of the recording that is tedious, painstaking, endless, wearying, annoying, repetitive and frustrating. Get the picture? This is a totally joyless task.
I forced myself through it to get it all done, as I knew that if I took a break I wouldn’t want to go back to it as it’s so horrible. I didn’t even have a sense of satisfaction when I completed all five titles. More great relief that I’d finally finished. Except I hadn’t, as I then decided to tackle another series of stories set in the post-American Civil War Era of Reconstruction. I’ve written just two novellas and am halfway through the third, so at half the length of the crime novels they were relatively easy to do. I uploaded the first two titles to ACX this week.
The whole ghastly saga is detailed in this thread on Litopia’s Colony, the friendliest and most helpful writers’ forum on the internet:
https://colony.litopia.com/threads/narrating-blues.7939/
There’s plenty of advice online about Audacity, ACX and Audible…look on Reddit and Quora, but let me offer some words of experience.
I used Audacity to record my audiobooks as it’s free and highly-praised. It is not without its problems, and though it’s regularly updated, the developers appear to have a schizoid attitude to how they apply ‘improvements’; an effect that worked fine before is suddenly uncooperative in the update.
By mistake, I made things worse, for partway through recording Book 2, I decided to download the latest version of Audacity. I did so from a site called FilePuma:
All seemed to be OK until I was two chapters from the end of the project. Attempting to open a chapter to edit it, I was confronted with a warning message that I needed to choose one of three options before proceeding. Choosing any of them destroyed the recording! The soundwave disappeared! What I hadn’t realised was that Audacity’s .aup file type can only be opened by Audacity. It was my fault that I hadn’t saved my work as a WAV or Mp3. Eventually, I lost 450 hours worth of work! I found the email address of one of Audacity’s developers and had a tense exchange of messages. It turned out that FilePuma had built their own flawed version of Audacity, but, but, but Audacity’s developers should have built in safeguards to prevent them doing so.
I was furious, but what could I do, but repeat the recordings and mastering?
Avoid FilePuma!
Only use official downloads of Audacity!
To add to the frustration, using ACX is a nightmare as it’s flakier than a leper’s backside! ACX is the quality control part of Audible which is the audiobook division of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. For your carefully crafted audiobook to be allowed to be shelved on Audible, it has to be submitted to ACX. They will take about one month to decide its fate. Audacity has a plug-in ACX app that can be used to check that you’ve got most things right, but it’s no guarantee that it will pass the full test.
Uploading an eBook to Kindle is relatively painless, but ACX is the village idiot of Amazon! There are hundreds of complaints online, but it’s been in a shoddy and unreliable state for months.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ACX/comments/kcah22/anyone_else_frustrated_by_the_upload_manager/
(that’s me as Augustus Devilheart)
It beggars belief that the richest man in the world has the world’s worst piece of software!_
As an example of how maddening it is, I uploaded the 12 chapters of my second Civil War novella this afternoon. 11 went through OK, but took me 90 minutes and multiple attempts to get ACX to accept Chapter 2.
I’m hoping that the popularity of audiobooks continues to increase and that my hard work pays off. Yesterday, I checked my audiobook sales and they’ve risen to 48, all without any cohesive promotion (2021’s campaign). 27 of them were for my 2nd Cornish Detective novel, which only went live on 27th December.
I should add, that Audible pays an author 40% of the cover price. Thus, the first Cornish Detective novel, priced at 18.29 earned me about £124 from 17 sales, while Book 2, at £22.89 (it’s longer) pays out £247 for 27 units – a total of £371. Sounds respectable, doesn’t it? But, bear in mind that I devoted at least 1,000 hours into creating each audiobook, which gives me an hourly pay rate of just over 7 pence!
Are you thinking of making an audiobook after reading all of this?!

Nick Cave has hard-won wisdom. I’ve recommended his weekly Red Hand Files newsletter before, and it’s worth subscribing to for the thoughtful replies he gives to questions, including “What do you do when the lyrics just aren’t coming?”
Nick Cave – The Red Hand Files – Issue #108 – What do you do when the lyrics just aren’t coming?
There are so many aspects of writing to consider, that it’s hard to think about them all while writing. That’s what editing is for.
But, last night reading in bed, I was brought up short by how C. J. Box ended his chapters. Over the years, I’ve read about a dozen of his Joe Pickett series. His game warden usually gets drawn into investigating crimes that are more complicated than they first appear. His home life mimics that of the author: married with three daughters. As I’m finding, writing my Cornish Detective series, it’s crucial to give the protagonist a personal life, otherwise, he’ll come across as robotic and unfeeling. Also, surveys show that most crime readers are mature females, so it’s wise to include emotions to do with family, friends and partners.
I’ve gotten into a habit of how to end chapters. I don’t know if it’s something I noticed from my reading thousands of crime novels, or whether I saw it as a piece of writing advice, but I tend to have a final sentence that poses a question or which indicates my main character’s mindset. My chapter endings look backwards to what’s happened and forward to possibilities. Thus, from the first Cornish Detective story, Who Kills A Nudist?, (which I’m getting a sore throat narrating), my first four chapters end:
* She watched him through her lens for a few more moments. He was so still, perhaps asleep. Then a gull landed and walked over to his face, pecking at his eyes. She grabbed her phone and dialled 999.
* He needed to question the witness who’d found the body, an American lady waiting with Mary in her car. Calling a constable over to stand watch on the tent, Neil gave the vic one last look. Who kills a nudist?
* Concentrate Neil, there might be a murder to solve. He’d learn more from CC’s examination of the corpse. Dying on a beach, powerless against the mighty sea felt primitive. Nature reduced us to fragile specks.
* Looking back at the blank staring windows of an empty house, Neil experienced a moment of sorrow. Their victim ought to be at home, repairing the bikes he donated to others, not stretched out cold on a mortuary slab.
In C. J. Box’s Stone Cold, he sometimes just ends a chapter, as in these examples, including in mid-conversation:
* He squinted and rubbed his chin.
* “Just get done and hurry home”, she said. “I’m worried what I might learn from Mrs Young, and you may need to get to Laramie in a hurry.”
* “You gonna tell me what the problem is?”
“No,” he said, turning away.
* Sheridan reached over and pressed PLAY on the Pandora window. Chris LeDoux again, with “Hooked on an 8 Second Ride.”
“That’s Mr Templeton out checking his final cutting of the year,” Latta said. Joe noted the tone of admiration in his voice.
It’s made me wonder if I’ve been overthinking things (yet again)
How do you end chapters?
I’m currently enjoying reading Ray Celestin’s The Axeman’s Jazz. Set in 1919, what’s noticeable, is that everyone in it smokes! It adds to the realism but feels odd, somehow. Smoking has been outlawed and is disapproved of these days, but back then tobacco was marketed as sophisticated and as a health aid.
I’ve never smoked, not one cigarette, partly because several senior members of my family died of lung cancer. As a result, I tend to forget to include smoking in my stories. I’ve just started writing the third story in my Art Palmer series, set in 1867, two years after the American Civil War ended. Smoking was common then, indeed Art is making for his sister’s tobacco plantation, but he doesn’t smoke. Not because he dislikes it, but more because the smell of smoke alerts the enemy to his whereabouts. The war may be over, but danger lurks.
Smoking in fiction is tied to some characters. Just think of Sherlock Holmes puffing on a pipe. He gauged thinking about investigations by his smoking—in The Red-Handed League, he says to Dr Watson:
“It is quite a three pipe problem, and I beg that you won’t speak to me for fifty minutes.”
Quite what variety of baccy Gandalf tokes down on with his pipe-weed still causes speculation.
The Caterpillar in Alice In Wonderland favours a hookah to inspire his pithy observations on life.
Hardboiled private-eyes of a certain era are always puffing away. Hard not to think of Humphrey Bogart playing Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe without a cigarette in his mouth.
We shouldn’t forget chewing tobacco. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books feature Blackheart and Jolly Sailor brands. And, what about the addictive tomacco in The Simpsons?
It’s not all fun…spitting chaw can say a lot about a character, such as Josey Wales:
Smoking can be used to show aspects of a character: their addictive nature, an attempt at sophistication or trying to fit in with a crowd, a means of staving off hunger, an aid to meditating and, as the old excuse goes, giving them ‘something to do with their hands.’
Do any of your characters smoke or chew tobacco?
Browsing the internet this morning, I came across the work of the Spanish self-taught street photographer Joan Colom.
In a portfolio of shots he took at a market, I saw a photograph that made me gasp in recognition, as it depicts how I’m feeling about my writing career at the moment.
It’s always amused me that the word career also means to stagger about…which certainly describes my erratic work history!
Although it’s joyful for me to be immersed in creating a new story, other aspects of writing can be repetitive and mundane. Self-publishing entails self-promotion, and how do I balance that with querying literary agents? I’m currently learning how to narrate and record and edit my voice, so I can add audiobooks versions of my crime novel series to Amazon KDP. But, I should really be adding posts to this writing blog Paul Pens and articles to my Cornish Detective website.
https://thecornishdetective.cloudaccess.host/
And, what about my presence on Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Instagram?
There are only so many hours in the day, so I sometimes feel like this market worker manoeuvring his inadequate trolley stacked with crates and trying not to drop any. Do you ever feel overwhelmed?
If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.
D.H. Lawrence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._H._Lawrence
Can anything be sadder than work unfinished? Yes, work never begun.
Christina Rossetti
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Rossetti
A while back, I started a thread about Inspiration from Art, but, just recently, I’ve been inspired by photographs.
Online resources for photos are many and most are free to use. I’m currently reading A Biography of Loneliness by Fay Bound Alberti. I usually look on the back flap to see who designed the cover and was surprised to find that there was no credit given other than Photo by Sweet Ice Cream on Unsplash—which is photo site. https://unsplash.com/
Presumably, someone at the Oxford University Press design department found the photo and added the title and author’s name. It’s an evocative image.
Richard Power’s novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance was inspired by a photo taken by the renowned August Sander.
My friend Mish lives in Wyoming and is a skilful photographer, artist and maker. She buys old photographs at garage sales and repurposes them into collages, which she sells at art and craft markets.
We all take photographs in our mind, memories of happy and sad times. But our memory is rebuilt each time we access it. The plasticity of our memories fascinates me, but it can lead to autoplagiarism, as Oliver Sacks explains:
https://www.brainpickings.org/oliver-sacks-on-
I’ve confirmed that recently by re-reading some of my old novellas and the first two Cornish Detective novels. Finding the same phrases and even whole sentences in different stories makes me feel like a cheating robot! What worries me about unintentionally cribbing from myself is that it makes my characters sound the same and that they’re all mini-mes! A couple of them even look alike, as I based their appearance on an uncle of mine.
Had I used found images, I could have avoided this trap.
Do any of you get inspired by old photographs?
Jim Croce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Croce